


Day by Day

by the_queenmaker



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Canon Crossover, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-15
Updated: 2011-06-15
Packaged: 2017-10-20 10:45:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_queenmaker/pseuds/the_queenmaker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>X-Men meets An Affair to Remember. Erik discovers that Charles is in a wheelchair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Day by Day

**Author's Note:**

> For [this prompt](http://1stclass-kink.livejournal.com/806.html?thread=464934#t464934) @ : _An[Affair to Remember](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_affair_to_remember) fusion/crossover. Post-movie, Erik thinks Charles will be there to stop his various plots and feels abandoned when Charles never shows up (sending his students instead). Then Erik discovers that Charles is in a wheelchair. Angst._

The first time Charles responds, he sends Havoc and Banshee and a young boy he doesn’t recognize who shoots beams out of his eyes. They function to a relatively admirable level as a team, but they’re babies.

Erik sends them away with an equivalent to a light swat on their behinds.

 _’Too easy, Charles,’_ he thinks, knowing that no one could hear his thoughts behind his impenetrable helmet.

//

The next time, they are joined by a white-haired woman who took flight and summoned thunder and wind to combat his team.

Erik feels a strong sense of disappointment, and blames it on the fact that he was taken by surprise and failed to achieve the objective.

//

After that, there are never less than five mutants, all who bear an all-too-familiar ‘X’ somewhere on their obviously Beast-influenced armors. There’s the man with adamantium claws whom Sabretooth claims as a rival, the woman with a patch of white in her hair who he had foolishly allowed touch him with her deadly hands, and a woman with fiery red hair who has Charles’s influence all over her, from the way she held herself to the steady expression in her eyes: his protégé.

Still, Charles does not make an appearance.

Over time, that disappointment turns into anger.

//

He is sitting on a chaise longue by the fire with a book in his lap when Erik unceremoniously flings the windows off its hinges and levitates in. Charles sits up and looks surprised, but not scared; he looks exactly the same as he did the day he left him behind on that Cuban beach, and the sight fills Erik with a sense of longing he cannot explain.

“Hello my friend,” Charles said softly. “It’s good to see you again.”

The words, however gently spoken, fill Erik with unholy fury and it takes all his self control not to reach out and strike the other man.

“Don’t call me that,” he hisses. Some of his emotions must’ve bled out at such close range because Charles flinches. “You forfeited your right to call me that when..."

"When what?" Charles regards him with absolute serenity, like he knows-- _knows_ \--that Eric will not harm him. The room was filled with metal objects. The man was wearing a watch with metal parts and a belt with a metal buckle around his waist. So many ways to kill him right here in his own house, and yet he was not afraid?

“When you decided to send your lackeys to deal with me when you know that you are the only person who can stand up to me,” he said. “Are your ideologies so weak that you won’t even fight for them yourself?”

His words are spoken with less anger and more bitterness than he intended, but he is certain that of all people, Charles would understand the underlying message. _If you didn’t believe in your own principles, why couldn’t you believe in mine?_

Charles looks at him with something akin to pity or sadness, neither of which he desires to see. “I have been busy recruiting,” he says. “It is important to me that mankind and mutants live alongside each other, but it is doubly more important that all who enter this institute become better masters of their own abilities.”

“To prepare for the war,” Erik challenges.

“To prepare for the future,” Charles corrects. “No matter what may happen.”

 _Come with me,_ he had said to Charles that day with sand beneath his knees. _I want you by my side._ It is almost dismaying to realize that even after all this time, that feeling has not diminished.

“Goodbye, Charles,” he says.

“Goodbye, Erik,” Charles replies, with a small smile that Erik knows, even now, will eat at him from now until eternity. On a whim, he takes Charles’s hand and presses his lips to the open palm. If only he had looked up, he would’ve seen that feeble smile slip away and reveal a manifestation of pain and sorrow and every conflicting feeling Erik had blocked Charles from seeing from the moment he fastened that helmet to his head.

But he doesn’t, and Charles’s hand falls limply by his side as Erik prepares to leave once again. The windows are open and Erik is seconds away from never returning when suddenly, he notices. The view from the window no longer faces the satellite dish. A memory returns to him.

The night after he had found the point between rage and serenity, after the chess game, he had pushed a laughing Charles against the wall by the window, and marveled at the beauty that was both in his arms and in the distance. He hadn’t thought about that night ever since Charles had said to him, without judgment: “You did this to me”.

Charles had changed rooms, from his boyhood bedroom on the top level to one of the study rooms on the ground floor. Charles, who had all the refined manners of an old-English gentleman, had not moved once from his position on the couch. Charles, who was looking at him now like he was torn between wanting him to leave and wanting him to see—

He would never have found out, never have known, if not for a serendipitous placement of a decorative wall mirror, angled in a way that allowed Charles to see the window outside from the position on his couch. It also allowed Erik to see in the reflection…

Charles follows his gaze and in an instant, the image in the mirror is altered as well, but not before he catches sigh of what Charles has been hiding in plain sight from him the entire time: a wheelchair.

“Stop it,” he says, and his voice sounds foreign to his own ears. “Stop what you’re doing.”

“I don’t know—“

“Now!”

Charles looks pained and so very conflicted, but slowly, the chair reappears next to him. It was a comfortably large and futuristic-looking chair, with evident adjustments from Hank. How much work had it been to keep that illusion so that it penetrated through the helmet?

Charles couldn’t walk. Charles had not appeared before his eyes again because _he couldn’t walk_. How could this have happened? When—no. It was impossible. But that moment played over in his head again. The sound of gunshots. The cry that had been ripped from Charles’s throat. The bullet, hard and unforgiving in the palm of his hand. Such a small bullet, couldn’t have…

“I did this,” he whispered.

“No!” If Charles could walk, he would have stood up right then. If he could walk. “You didn’t do it on purpose, it’s not your fault.”

“I did this,” he repeated, louder this time. “I’ve…I’ve been so furious with you, and _I_ was the one who...”

“Erik,” Charles looks decidedly more upset now. “Please don’t look at me like that.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Erik kneels by Charles’s side. _If that bullet had to have a target, why couldn’t it have been me?_

“It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” Charles said softly.

“Don’t forgive me so easily!” Erik exclaims, pacing. “I can’t…Charles, I—“

He has so many things he wants to say to Charles; Charles, who has always treated him with compassion and understanding; Charles, who has seen into the deepest, darkest parts of him, and still called him ‘my friend’. If words were going to fail him now, he thought as he slowly lifts the helmet off his head, then he would do this.

His hands reach out and their minds join together with a small gasp. Everything he feels, everything he thinks, everything he is, he will open to the other man, and hope for forgiveness. Warmth and affection floods his mind and it feels a bit like coming home. For the first time, his resolve in his cause crumbles and he is overcome with an overwhelming desire to just stay there.

“Oh my friend,” Charles laughs, low and quiet, tilting Erik’s face up for a kiss. “I have missed you so.”

“Don’t call me that,” Erik murmurs, wrapping his arms around Charles’s narrow hips. “I do not deserve to be called your friend.”

“Listen to me,” Charles said, and his tone leaves no room for discussion. “I know how you feel, but you cannot give up in your beliefs right now.”

“But…”

“I am not so naïve to believe that peaceful coexistence between humans and mutants can be achieved through words alone,” Charles said. “The world needs someone like you, who fights wholeheartedly for the mutant cause. At the same time, the world needs someone like me, who fights for acceptance and a belief that we can live alongside each other. Neither of us will have the impact we hope for without the other.”

I don’t care about the world, Erik wants to say aloud, knowing that he didn’t have to.

“I do.” Charles said simply. _If you won’t do it for the world, then do it for me._

They stay like that for a long time, Erik with his head in Charles’s lap, Charles with his fingers in Erik’s hair, until the first rays of sunlight begin peeking through the window. They’re silent when Erik arises, having said everything already. But when Erik goes to the window, he hesitates.

“Charles, I…”

“I know,” the other man finishes for him.

When Erik puts his helmet on, he is Magneto again. When his feet leave the windowsill, Charles is Professor X again. But at the very least, he takes away with him a reason worth fighting for and the realization that there will never be another, for either of them.

//

 _"I don’t regret loving you, so go, and take only the good memories with you"_

[ the.end ]


End file.
